RIP, Napster (Again)

It’s been so long since Napster ceased to exist as a file-sharing platform, there are adults roaming the Earth that weren’t even alive when it shut down. Well, the brand was popular enough that someone bought it up and parlayed that into a paid music service.

That eventually merged with Rhapsody, which had its own history as a branch of Real Networks and was the service Jessica and I subscribed to for decades. Under the umbrella of Naptster, the streaming service kept going, and, from what I understand, rivaled Tidal as the music service that paid artist far better than others, specifically Spotify.

For those of you who remember, I compiled a playlist on Napster for The Gray Summer, complete with dozens of songs reminiscent of the summer of 1995. I can never remember the final number of songs, but it was a lot, and all of them so relevant to the story I told (a story that, perhaps another time, I’ll explain why it needs re-tooled)

All good things evidently really do come to an end, and like everything it seems in this day and age, Napster didn’t so much die as it was murdered.

It appears that the owners of Napster sold the service off to a place call Infinite Reality, which right off the bat sounds like some horseshit front to launder cryptocurrency from the Sinaloa Cartel. Well, I’m not exactly far off.

Their core business? AI. I guess.

Napster/Infinite Reality’s CEO is this clown named John Acunto.

Good luck finding anything on their Web site about the guy. Or anyone else who works there. Or investor information.

I had to dig to find anything on this guy, and it turns out that he tried to do social media years ago, when he snapped up the assets of Tsu (remember that joint???) and rebranded it as display, which I guess was aiming to get college athletes paid through the use name, image likeness (NIL), which the NCAA greenlit and has exploded.

Acunto didn’t really achieve that. In fact, have you ever heard of the social media platform display? It was shuttered soon after Infinite Reality’s purchase of Napster.

So, if past performance is any indication of the future, whatever this Acunto character has planned for Napster can end only one way: Badly.

Needless to say, I, along with countless others, let the folks at Napster have it on the Google Play Store. And to nobody’s surprise, the responses have been predictably canned and pathetic. Here’s an example of their bullshit:

Impressively, there’s going to be some poor souls that won’t end their subscriptions fast enough before they discover their songs and playlists have effectively been Thanos-snapped.

Also, everyone, including me, now have to find themselves a streaming service thanks to these dopes. And we’ll have to build our playlists all over again, plus there’s no guarantee we’re going to choose a service that will fairly compensate artists (Tidal remains the clubhouse leader year; it’s always fuck Spotify).

Things like this usually end in some sort of class-action lawsuit. And while we’ll only get $10 (if that) as part of a settlement, I can think of plenty of other good uses for that money then supporting some jackass whose sole goal is to take a brand everyone knows and turn it into something completely worthless.